Fractional Chief AI Officer · SMEs
I help owners of small and mid-sized businesses find where AI genuinely helps, fix the process around it, and build the practical tools that replace hours of manual work — so the improvement shows up on the P&L, not just in a demo.
Business-first, not tech-first. We start with your problems and the numbers — not with tools.
Find where AI actually helps — and where it doesn't.
A structured look at how your business runs today: the manual work, the bottlenecks, the data you already hold. You leave with a prioritised, plain-English roadmap ranked by return and effort — not a list of tools to buy.
Best for owners who suspect AI could help but don't know where to start.
Senior AI leadership, without a full-time hire.
I own your AI agenda on a monthly engagement: what to build, what to buy, what to leave alone. Vendor decisions, data governance, and getting your team confident using the tools — the judgement of a CAIO at a fraction of the cost.
Best for businesses ready to make AI a capability, not a one-off project.
Tools built around your process — not the other way round.
When something off-the-shelf won't fit, I build it: automations, AI agents and internal apps that plug into the systems you already use. Quoting, ticketing, data entry, onboarding, document handling — the repetitive work, handled.
Best for teams losing hours to manual, repeatable work.
A deliberately unglamorous way of working. It keeps AI pointed at business outcomes, and it dovetails with the strategy work STRATEJI does on the marketing and management side.
Understand how the business actually runs. Find the costly manual work, the process gaps, and the data already sitting unused.
Rank the opportunities by return and feasibility. Pick the few that pay back fastest — and park the rest with eyes open.
Ship a working tool that fits into what you already use. Small, integrated, and in production — not a pilot that never leaves the lab.
Measure the change against the numbers that matter. Once it's earning its keep, extend it to the next process.
Five systems running in production across four business functions — four built for Fonzel, a smart-locker manufacturer, and one for an HR-tech company.
Fonzel · smart-locker manufacturer
The problem — Support tickets piled up in a shared inbox; customers waited, and the team drowned in repetitive questions.
The change — Incoming tickets are now triaged and answered automatically within a minute, day and night, with the team stepping in only where judgement is needed.
Email ingestion → AI triage & drafting → helpdesk, running unattended.
Fonzel · smart-locker manufacturer
The problem — Every quote meant wrestling a spreadsheet by hand — slow, error-prone, and hard to keep consistent as the catalogue grew.
The change — A pre-sales quotation engine now assembles accurate, consistent quotes in minutes, with the engineering detail pulled straight from the product's design files.
Custom web app with SolidWorks integration and a full automated test suite.
Fonzel · smart-locker manufacturer
The problem — Onboarding, records and offboarding lived across disconnected tools and manual steps that were easy to miss.
The change — The full hire-to-retire journey now runs on a connected system, so people processes happen on time without someone chasing each step.
HR platform wired to document storage and workflow automation.
Fonzel · smart-locker manufacturer
The problem — Finance re-keyed payment advices from emails into the ERP — tedious, slow, and a reliable source of small mistakes.
The change — Payment advices are now read automatically and posted into the ERP, freeing the finance team from the retyping and the reconciliation errors that came with it.
Email ingestion → AI document extraction → ERP posting.
An HR-tech company
The problem — Large volumes of inconsistent HR records made reporting unreliable and slowed everything downstream.
The change — An automated pipeline now cleans and standardises the data as it flows through, so what reaches the business is consistent and usable.
Custom ETL pipeline with automated validation.
Everything above is something you have to take my word for. These two you can click. Both are products I built and run myself — real software with paying-customer pricing, not prototypes — and the demos are open, no signup.
A content team, on autopilot.
One brief in, publish-ready content out — posts, carousels, reels and avatar video across seven platforms and nine Indian languages, with a review step before anything goes live. It also audits a site for SEO and answer-engine visibility. Built and priced for Indian small businesses that can't afford an agency retainer.
See the demo(opens in a new tab)Know your portfolio's real health.
Upload a mutual-fund statement and the portfolio assembles itself, then goes under the microscope: how much your funds secretly overlap, where returns actually came from, how the portfolio behaves under stress, and whether you're on track for a named life goal. Built for both individual investors and the advisors who manage them.
See the demo(opens in a new tab)I mention these for one reason: they show I can take something from blank page to running product on my own. If you want that capability pointed at your business, that's the Custom AI Solutions track.
Talk to me about a buildI'm Abhijit Paranjape — an AI consultant and Fractional Chief AI Officer based in Pune. My work isn't to sell you AI; it's to help you decide where it belongs, fix the process around it, and build the tool that makes the improvement real.
That means I stay business-first. We start with your problems, your process gaps and the numbers you want to move — then, and only then, do we talk about how. The result is AI that pays for itself, not a science project.
I've built and shipped five systems now running in production across support, sales, HR and finance — the kind of unglamorous, high-leverage automation that quietly gives owners their time back.
AI works best when it's pointed at the right problem. STRATEJI — Anuj Agarwal's consultancy, "Marketing Clarity for Founders" — brings the business, marketing and management strategy; I bring the AI implementation. Together that's both halves of the job: the strategy that decides what matters, and the systems that make it happen.
Abhijit remains your primary point of contact. STRATEJI strengthens the strategy and process side of the engagement where it helps — it is not a separate brand you have to manage.
STRATEJI · strategy side
Abhijit · AI side
A short, no-pressure call. Tell me where the manual work is piling up, and I'll tell you — honestly — whether AI can help and where I'd start. If it can't, I'll say so.
Pune, India · Remote across India & beyond